مقاله  کامپیوتر  اینترنت  موبایل  عشق

Yahoo feature
By David Callan

1. Introduction

1.1 What is Yahoo?
Yahoo is the world's most visited Internet destination, for many people Yahoo is the Internet. Yahoo INC is a leading global Internet communications, commerce and media company that offers a comprehensive branded network of services. These services are available worldwide and the company's global web network includes 24 world properties including Yahoo UK & Ireland, Yahoo Japan, Yahoo Germany, and Yahoo France to name just a few. A recently released figure shows that Yahoo had 156 million different people availing of these worldwide services in December 2001. The latest figure released regarding Irish interest in Yahoo shows that Yahoo had 340, 732 unique visitors in January 2002. Both these figures grow month by month. Yahoo INC'S flagship site www.yahoo.com was the first online navigational guide to the web and is therefore the leading guide in terms of traffic, advertising, household and business user reach. Yahoo INC has offices in Europe, Asia, Latin America, Australia, Canada and the United States.

2. History of Yahoo

2.1 Its creators
Yahoo was created in April 1994 by two Ph.D. candidates in Electrical engineering named David Filo and Jerry Yang at Stanford University in California. Both have been instrumental in building Yahoo into the world's most highly trafficked web site and one of the Internets most recognised brands

David Filo, a native of Moss Bluff, Los Angeles serves as a key technologist, directing the technical operations behind the company's global network of Web properties. Filo began his studies at Stanford after graduating from Tulane University in 1988. He was described as quiet, intense, and technically brilliant. Filo holds a B.S. degree in computer engineering from Tulane University and an M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. He is currently on a leave of absence from Stanford's electrical engineering Ph.D. program.

Jerry Yang, is a Taiwanese native raised in San Jose, California. He moved with his family to the United States shortly after he turned age 10. When he started school in San Jose, his English vocabulary consisted of only one word--shoe. Yang says that he was a lazy student with a short attention span. Yet he succeeded in academics. He entered Stanford as an undergraduate in 1990 and earned both a bachelor's and master's degree in four years. Though he met with a few prospective employers at that point, Yang felt he lacked both the experience and the maturity to join the work force. Instead of donning a suit and entering the corporate world, he chose to stay in school. He is a leading force in the media industry. As a member of Yahoo's board of directors, Yang works closely with the company's president and CEO to develop corporate business strategies and guide the future direction of the company. Yang holds B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Stanford University and like Filo is currently on a leave of absence from Stanford's electrical engineering Ph.D. program

2.2 The early years
Yahoo started out as an idea, grew into a student hobby and then turned into a full time passion for both Filo and Yang. Now it is the brand name most associated with the Internet. It was started in February 1994 in Filo's and Yang's campus trailer. Originally it was called "Jerry and David's guide to the World Wide Web", but after randomly scanning pages in a dictionary for a smarter sounding name, they came up with Yahoo. Yahoo is actually an acronym for "Yet another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". The acronym represents the fact that Yahoo seeks to be a directory or hierarchy that serves as an oracle to the modern day office dweller who is officious. They just saw it as a way to keep track of their personal interests on the Internet, as at that time in 94 or so, the only means to find things on the Internet was spider based engines such as altavista.

Yahoo itself first resided on Yang's student workstation, "Akebono," while the software was lodged on Filo's computer, "Konishiki" - both named after legendary sumo wrestlers. The Yahoo directory was used originally only by Filo, Yang and fellow students at Stanford University, however the power of word of mouth kicked in and gradually people from the surrounding area and colleges began using it.

As Yahoo grew the strains on a university's resources became more and more extreme. Yahoo basically moved in and set up shop in Netscape facilities in early 1995. In the days before browser wars Netscape was a very large portal in its own right and had vast technical resources.

Due to the torrent of traffic and enthusiastic reception Yahoo was receiving, the founders knew they had a potential business on their hands. In March 1995, the pair incorporated the business and met with dozens of Silicon Valley venture capitalists. They eventually came across Sequoia Capital, the well-regarded firm whose most successful investments included Apple Computer, Atari, Oracle and Cisco Systems. They agreed to fund Yahoo in April 1995 with an initial investment of nearly $2 million.

Realising their new company was growing quickly, Jerry and David began to shop for a management team. They hired Tim Koogle, a veteran of Motorola and an alumnus of the Stanford engineering department, as chief executive officer and Jeffrey Mallett, founder of Novell's WordPerfect consumer division, as chief operating officer. They secured a second round of funding in autumn 1995 from investors Reuters Ltd. and Softbank. Yahoo launched a highly successful IPO in April 1996 with a total of 49 employees.

As Yahoo grew as a directory people would bookmark it and link to this one of their favourite sites. Yahoo would not be where it is today at all if it were not for all of the sites that linked to it early on. The link, even before yahoo served as the lifeblood of the Internet and the means by which people could endorse their favourite sites.

Yahoo basically just took this to a whole new level. By linking to so many sites in categories many sites in return linked to them. Yahoo received an enormous amount of television and other media attention from 94 to 97 or so and became the defacto spokesman for the Internet world. As Yahoo transformed itself from a hobby to an empire, corporate thinking began to set in. The site and company began to think of itself as a "portal." A gobbling up of related sites that could serve to defend Yahoo's position was the result.

Yahoo purchased geocities, and free e-mail provider rocketmail.com from their parent companies. This was so that Yahoo could provide free WebPages and e-mail services to its visitors. Yahoo also acquired Webring.com by acquiring their parent company. Webring was a company with roots similar to Yahoo that grew as a means for individuals to organise data selectively by subject. When a webring on a given topic became too big or unfocused then another one could be formed with membership determined by the knowledge of the founder of the ring. This was a serious yahoo threat and that is partly why they were acquired.

Yahoo next acquired broadcast.com. By acquiring them they gained a foothold in the on-line broadcast radio and television market that they feel will be important in the future. Also by acquiring them they acquired simplenet.com, a small provider of webhosting services. This is ironic considering Yahoo itself still uses Exodus Communications to host their site rather than their own webhosting division.

Yahoo proceeded to create things that the general public would come back to see. Free e-mail would force people to come back daily to check their e-mail. Free webhosting via geocities would increase Yahoo's reach for advertisers. However it also would make it so in effect people collectively would be coming to Yahoo to find their own sites and Yahoo would make money coming to their flagship site and as people left for their favourite geocities pages. As free e-mail and WebPages services grew in the late 90s the market became common everywhere. Yahoo later formed on-line clubs and on-line game sections so that people could play chess on-line or meet up with others with similar needs. Just why so many advertisements on Television for Yahoo clubs are aired remains a mystery to many hardcore Yahoo users they had from the beginning.

Yahoo has moved from the areas of data organisation and ontology into many diverse and wide-ranging areas. These include news, stock quotes, and other syndicated information, which is purchased. Yahoo also serves as a hub for on-line shopping and a centre for e-commerce via Yahoo on-line stores. All of these changes have moved yahoo more away from the "cool" hip place to gather and more toward the realm of a big Walmart.

All of these changes also have negated one factor, that the Internet has grown, but Yahoo's editorial surfing staff has not grown all that much. Yahoo's core supporters in the beginning were webmasters who gave Yahoo the grass roots support and help necessary for a small force of two to transform itself into the world's leading on-line entity.